International Academic Conference - Europe 2015. The effect of Perestroika: regimes and risks of polyphonic knowledge

Conference venue: European Humanities University - Vilnius, Lithuania
Period: May 15-16, 2015
Deadline for submitting abstracts: March 15, 2015

By 2015, 30 years have passed since the beginning of transformations which have come to be known as Perestroika. It is also the year of the 25th anniversary of Lithuania’s independence and the 10th anniversary of EHU’s reestablishment in Vilnius. On the occasion of this triple anniversary, the organizers of the European Humanities University’s annual student conference are inviting undergraduate and graduate students majoring in various social sciences and humanities to join in an interdisciplinary discussion of Perestroika and its effects, interpreted broadly.

We invite you to examine Perestroika not only as a specific historical event which has radically transformed the present-day political and discursive landscapes, but also as a powerful conceptual resource for interdisciplinary work with changes being made to social constructs and practices under conditions of the collapse of one symbolic order and the formation of many.

From this perspective, we offer to discuss how knowledge is transformed under the influence of new technologies (communicative, cultural, scientific), how regimes of polyphony of the knowledgeable ones are connected to the democratization of traditional institutions (education, religion, laws), how the polyphony is realized through space (public, urban, virtual), and to what extent the new orders of decentralized knowledge production allow to articulate the experience of diverse social groups, including the marginal ones. Speaking of the effects of Perestroika, we invite to discuss the old/new rhetoric and intellectual affects, the change of status of theory and the knowledge economies, centrifugalism and rigidity, footprints and wounds, academic imagination and resistance, loyalties and discursive communities, new institutionalizations and deformed networks, media interventions and visualizations, interpretive frames and background practices, policies and technologies involved in creating and maintaining the present-day polyphony.

Thirty – twenty five – ten years after, the transformed and transforming worlds do not seem much simpler. Contemplating this complexification, we offer to take into account not only regimes and gains but also the risks of decentralization and polyphony, including the disenchantment of the reformers and political apathy of citizens, geopolitical instability and distrust in theory, memory wars, and the new Ice Age.

Undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to submit abstracts.
Please submit the online application here no later than March 15, 2015. Participation in the conference is free of charge (no registration fee), but submitted abstracts will be reviewed and selected.
Only selected applicants will be invited to participate. Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance by April 2, 2015.

The conference languages: English, Belarusian, and Russian.
A collection of conference papers will be published.

Visa Support: Students requiring visa support are to indicate their passport data in the application form. Visas are issued free of charge.

Accommodation: Accommodation is provided to all the participants free of charge for the period of the conference (May 15–16).

European Humanities University
e-mail: studentconference@ehu.lt